No Legitimate Authority: New York’s Attempt to Regulate Bitcoin Businesses

A few thoughts I had about New York’s attempt to license and regulate Bitcoin businesses. Not only will they kill white market Bitcoin businesses in New York (they’ll all go elsewhere), but they have no fundamental authority to control a private digital currency anyway. Trading Bitcoin is simply broadcasting a cryptographically signed message to a voluntary peer to peer network and is therefore an action that clearly falls under freedom of speech / expression. Writing the software itself too is an example of this. We should not play nice with these governments that are exercising more and more the implications of their understanding of their relationship with us — namely, that they believe they own us. They don’t though… and this will be a hard lesson for the central planners.